Africa’s highest mountain has become a beacon for climate change because the famous snows of Kilimanjaro are melting.  I’m climbing Kili@60 with a team from the PATT Foundation to raise awareness of climate change and raise funds for wildlife charities – and these two critical causes are connected.

The Gorilla Organization www.gorillas.org is dedicated to ensuring the survival of gorillas in their natural habitat.   It pioneered the approach of asking people in Africa whose activities posed a threat to the gorillas, ‘what do you need in order to stop’.   The answers were often simple – better ways of making a living than poaching, charcoal-making, wild honey-collecting, logging, etc.   By helping provide alternative livelihoods, the GO approach helps create a culture of conservation among local communities, without whose support the long-term survival of gorillas and their habitat would be impossible.   The Gorilla Organization grew out of the work of the late Dr Dian Fossey, with whom I had the privilege of working in the 1970s, studying and protecting the Mountain Gorillas.   When poachers killed a young silverback named Digit on the last day of 1977, our work changed forever.  The shock of finding his decapitated body lives with me still.   Dian established a ‘Digit Fund’ to finance anti-poaching patrols, but as the complexity of the task became apparent, new ways of tackling the threats to gorillas were called for and the UK branch evolved into the Gorilla Organization.   I am proud to serve as Chairman of the Trustees, and hope that by climbing Kilimanjaro you will be moved to support our work.

What is the link to climate change?   By protecting gorillas and giving people sustainable livelihoods, GO helps to maintain healthy forest ecosystems in Africa.   Gorillas are keystone species in tropical forests in 10 countries across Central Africa.   Sometimes called the ‘Gardeners of the Forest’, they feed on leaves, stems, flowers, roots and fruit, and in doing so they prune the plants, create light-gaps by breaking branches, act as seed dispersal agents and fertilise the forest with their droppings.   Most tropical tree species depend on animals to disperse their seeds, and so each huge, towering, centuries-old rainforest tree we see today is the result of an ecological event hundreds of years ago when, say, a gorilla ate a fruit, swallowed the seed and the next day deposited it in nutrient-rich dung far from the parent plant.   If we want tropical forests to continue storing carbon, generating rainfall and stabilising our climate for centuries to come, we MUST protect the primates and other animals today.   By supporting the Gorilla Organization you are helping to change the way people perceive these great apes – respecting them for their intelligence and understanding their role in the ecosystems which sustain us all.